


the map on my heart (leads to you)

by eclenic



Category: Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: (not that au since they're definitely already soulmates but whatever), Angst, Canon-adjacent, F/M, Mutual Idiocy, Mutual Pining, Romance, Soulmate AU, and a lot of Feelings, scar-sharing as soul marks, soul marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-14
Updated: 2019-07-14
Packaged: 2020-06-28 10:54:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,447
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19810801
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eclenic/pseuds/eclenic
Summary: What is a scar, really, but a physical record of an event? A story told in blood and flesh - some sad, others not, but all with a tale to tell. Just like anything else, some people have more to tell than others.Lucy got her first scar when she was eight years old, and it didn't belong to her.





	the map on my heart (leads to you)

**Author's Note:**

> Oh, my. This fic started life back in April, when I saw a prompt about scar-sharing as a soulmate AU and it wouldn't let me go. It was _supposed_ to be a quick one, but that has apparently never been my style, and it just kept growing and growing into this. I had a lot of fun leaning into every soulmate trope I could get my hands on, and I hope you enjoy it.
> 
> Title comes from _Please Keep Loving Me_ by James TW.

Lucy’s first scar appears when she is eight.

(Flynn is sixteen, fighting the first of what will be many wars, and still green enough that he doesn’t see the knife coming. Not until the blade is already sliding under his ribs.)

Most first scars are tiny - the product of one childhood misadventure or other - but not this one. Three inches long, ugly and angry looking, red and twisted. Her mother, who is at first thrilled to hear the news, grimaces when she sees it. This will become a common reaction.

Two weeks later, the second scar arrives. Even young as she is, Lucy understands this is only the beginning.

* * *

Flynn wakes up one morning in the middle of his current war zone with pierced ears. He can’t keep the smile off his face for the rest of the day.

It’s not his first. That was a few years ago now. That one isn’t much, a tiny nick below the bones of his wrist, but he still runs his thumb over it for good luck every now and then.

He likes getting new marks. More than others do, even. He’s dished out so many to his soulmate, whoever they are. It always seems unfair that of the marks on his body, there are only a handful that aren’t his own.

He wonders though, because when they get do get scars, they’re in the oddest places. The palm of their hand, right below the fingers; a pair across their ankle bone; a long one behind their hairline. It seems like every time there’s a new addition he spends a long moment wondering _How on earth?_ before he says his usual quiet thanks to the universe that their life is at least kinder to them than his is.

The same thing happened to one of his squad mates a few months ago. It’s not a guarantee, but that’s the first day he starts thinking of his soulmate as _she_ instead of _they_.

* * *

It’s wrong to say she minds the scars - she doesn’t. The spider-webbing across her skin - it’s hers, at least as much hers as they are his. Once, daydreaming in biology class, she hears the phrase connective tissue, and it fits perfectly. That’s what these are - thin lines stretched across the universe from one person to another. And for that exact reason, she knows every single one - every line, every raised edge, even the places where scars used to be and have almost faded away. They’re her story, too, and one she wants to remember.

It is, however, accurate to say that - for his sake as much as hers - she wishes he would be more careful. They don’t hurt, at least. They feel different than her own skin - just a little, so she knows which are hers and which are his - but that’s all. And it’s a good thing because, by the time she’s sixteen, she has more scars than anyone she knows, and probably more than most of her friends combined. Some, she only gets to keep for a week or so - a split lip here, a grazed knuckle there, little things that heal over and let her know he’s still out fighting his battles. Others, though, stick around - almost always the bigger, meaner-looking ones, the ones that make people gasp and that she feels strangely protective over.

Everyone has a different reaction, but what’s for certain is that she is in a category of one. She hears the whispers, sees the looks - half pity, half awe - that seem to follow her around. Some people are even jealous because they assume she’ll find him far more easily than anyone else. She tells them what she tells everyone - no, she doesn’t know who he is, but that he’s a soldier of some kind, that much is clear. She can’t tell whether the sheer number of scars means he’s terrible at it, or fantastic.

(He has always been _him_ to her, if only because she thinks anyone else would be far better at not getting blown up.)

She makes up stories - they all do, imagining how the marks came to be, when they might meet, how they’ll find each other. In the movies, the soulmates always see each other across a room and just know, but it doesn’t work that way. Not for everyone, anyway. Lucy is sure she will right away, though. She already knows his body at least as well as she knows her own. It seems absurd that she could ever see him and not recognise him.

(She might look back later and laugh at the certainty of youth; she might also wonder if, on some level, she always knew.)

* * *

It goes on like that for a few years: the sun rises, the earth rotates, and Garcia Flynn accumulates scars. It was ever thus. The third time he gets half-blown up, Flynn starts saying silent apologies to whoever out there has to pay the price for his mistakes. Against all practised wisdom, he does his best to let them heal properly and fade where others would try to keep them as prominent as possible.

Most of them stay with him anyway. Only the smallest ones ever really disappear; it's just how it works. Still, it’s the least he can do, he thinks, if he’s going to keep using his body as a record of every battle he’s ever fought. There will be a lot of them.

* * *

They say every scar tells a story, but that’s not true: every one of hers tells two. There’s the story she doesn’t know yet, his story, and there’s the story of what they mean to her.

Like the one on her chest that appears a week after her father dies, when she still hasn’t cried. None of it seems real. She walks into rooms expecting him to be there, and the silence when he isn’t is like broken glass. But Amy, all of nine years old, still needs to be taken care of. Lucy still has homework she insists on doing even though her teachers tell her not to worry. So no, she hasn’t cried. She’s been too busy keeping the world turning for that. And then the mark appears and as she traces its lines, the dam in her chest doesn’t so much break as it explodes. It seems more like fate than ever.

These are the kinds of stories she wants to tell him, one day.

* * *

For whatever reason, as he fights his way through the years, Flynn never expects to meet his soulmate. He has this sense that wherever she is, it’s nowhere near here. That can only be a good thing.

He does think about her from time to time. Can’t stop himself. She must have a well-formed, if unflattering, impression of him - if every scar tells a story, he’s given her a whole novel’s worth. But he has much less of an idea about her.

There’s one thing, though, one arena in which she almost matches him for numbers. On his fingertips are dozens of tiny paper cut scars - most fade after a few weeks, but new ones sometimes take their place. So, he figures, books, and starts reading anything he can. Just in case.

* * *

Amy comes home the day after her sixteenth birthday with her own name tattooed on her hip.

“Don’t tell mom,” she says, grinning as she shows her. “Everyone’s doing it. I mean, it’s a scar, right? I’m hoping they’ll write back.”

They don’t, not immediately, but it doesn’t stop Lucy from considering it.

* * *

When he meets Lorena, he’s sure: this is her. She’s his soulmate.

And then she tells him she doesn’t have one.

“They died when I was young,” she tells him, almost casually, and he tries to pretend it doesn’t feel like someone has punched him in the stomach.

Lorena notices, though, and reaches out for his hand. “What I mean is, it doesn’t matter to me,” she says. “I understand if it does to you. But a soulmate - it’s choosing each other, even when you have the chance not to. So if you choose me, I’ll choose you.”

And for the best part of the next decade, he does exactly that, and it’s so nearly perfect it’s hard to tell the difference. Lorena is the first person to look at him, peel back all of his layers, and decide she still loves him. That, he is fairly sure, has to be a miracle. He tells her about his parents, who died right at the start of his first war, and she understands him then. He can still see himself - fifteen years old, tall and skinny and utterly alone in the world. The army put a rifle in his hands mostly out of pity. Since then he’s backed one underdog after another, and probably always will.

He asks her to marry him the night before he departs for yet another war; he’s still surprised she said yes.

* * *

The night before her doctoral exam Lucy gets a new scar, and she could swear all the air leaves the room when she sees it in the mirror. It’s a skill she’s gained over the years - learning what comes from knives and what comes from something more jagged and unpredictable. What she decides has to have been a shrapnel blast covers half her side, irregular and twisted - that’s easily the worst one. She used to have one down her leg that flummoxed her until she figured out it was a burn.

This one, though, is different. She only has one or two like it. This is a small round pucker, right over her heart, and she need not match it to the others to know it’s a bullet.

She’s always known this could happen. Expected it, really. Whoever he is, her soulmate leads a violent life, and those aren’t often long ones. Since she was a teenager she’s gone to sleep every night half-expecting to wake up in the morning and find her skin clear and unmarked.

She doesn’t sleep that night, not for the first time. Instead, she lies in bed with her fingers tracing the edges of the scar, worried that if she stops touching it even for a second, it will disappear. Over and over, all she thinks is, _Live_.

It’s still there in the morning, and she figures if he can survive that, they both can survive anything.

* * *

“If you find her one day,” Lorena tells him, more than once, “I want you to be happy.”

“I _am_ ,” is all he ever says in reply. Sometimes he thinks there must have been a great cosmic mistake; one day he’ll wake up and find her marks on his body and all will be as it should.

Later - so much later, when he’s running with nothing but a yawning chasm of grief for company - he knows he was wrong.

He stares at the scar on his wrist - the first one that wasn’t his, the one he used call lucky - and he hates it. He hates that it’s still there and thinks, half-mad in his grief, that he should cut it out. It, and all the others that aren’t his and weren’t Lorena’s. That way he’d be like anyone else who’s lost the person they cherish most. Blank. Empty. It would match how he feels.

* * *

“I have a scar on my right foot,” Lucy’s date says. “It happened five years ago.”

Dating is... exhausting, to be honest. There’s a careful, choreographed dance to the whole thing - everyone is looking, but nobody seems to want to admit it. And it’s not like people can strip off at the dinner table and compare scars. So instead, this: a kind of call-and-response, a quick litmus test. Nine times out of ten, Lucy is already sure before they ask.

“So do I,” Lucy always replies, because she has scars everywhere, “but not yours.”

* * *

Something incredible happens: she stops getting new scars. There haven’t been as many recently anyway, but she realises one day it’s been over a year. Then two years. Then three.

She should be happy for him, and she is. A little peace is nothing more than he surely deserves, wherever he is. Still, there is a strange sad pang in her chest at the idea that he might have settled down somewhere without her.

And slowly, she lets go. Not forget - she can’t when she sees him every morning in the mirror, and then again at night.

Lots of people never find their soulmate. With the way the entire rest of her life has gone, it seems to make perfect sense that she’d be one.

* * *

It sounds like the start of a bad joke: two soulmates walk into a bar. It’s anything but.

He feels her before he sees her. The bell over the door gives a dim ring and at the same moment, every inch of his skin seems to vibrate at the same frequency. It’s the alcohol, he assumes, and takes another drink. But then she sits next to him, and it happens again.

“Hello, Garcia.”

He turns, as the sensation continues to travel over him, still in the realisation’s midst and not sure of its endpoint, and there she is. He doesn’t ask how she knows his name - somehow, it would seem more strange if she didn’t.

She reaches for his hand - the wrong move, but it almost seems like she can’t quite help herself - and he yanks it away. It’s been two weeks and the last person to touch him was his wife; he’d like to keep it that way as long as possible. She flinches and minutely shakes her head - at herself - then places her hand on the bar, palm up and fingers outstretched.

“I’m not going to hurt you. My name is Lucy, and you don’t know me yet but I know you. I know what happened to your family. What Rittenhouse did. I’m here to help.”

There’s a fondness to the lines of her face, but sadness clings to her like cigarette smoke. She’s trying to hide it, he can see, but she can’t when she says, “ _Please,_ ” and her voice cracks straight down the middle of the word.

Neither of them says the words. They don’t need to. A moment passes, then another. He reaches out and - so carefully, like he’s not sure what will happen when he does - lays his hand in hers.

If her walking in, her simple _nearness_ , was enough to set off sparks in his blood, touching her is like taking the lightning bolt full-force.

Then, as if he needed any more answers to the question of who she is, her thumb traces the exact line of an old scar on his hand. “This one,” she says as she touches it - so faded it’s barely visible, only distinguishable by touch. “It arrived on your wedding day, and when you saw it your hands shook so much you couldn’t tie your bow tie. So you got married without it.”

There’s exactly one person in the world who knows that story, and she’s dead. He’s never told anyone else.

“Not yet. But you will,” she says, and he realises he must have said that out loud. She slides something towards him with her other hand - a little leather-bound book, the letters _LP_ in gold script on one corner. “This is mine. You’re going to need it.”

He picks it up, and she lets out a breath as he takes his hand back to flick through the pages. The writing gets messier the further he gets in, the pages more sparsely filled. Towards the end, they’re almost blank.

He looks back at her - she hasn’t stopped looking at him like she wants to take every second she can - and asks, “Do we win?”

She says, “I hope so.”

* * *

"The Ancient Greeks," Lucy says to the full auditorium, and you could hear a pin drop, "believed all humans were once two people. Four legs, four arms, two faces, the whole deal. And we were strong. Too strong. So strong, in fact, that one day Zeus felt so threatened by humanity's power that he split us all down the middle, and split our souls in half in the process. We were doomed, then, and so miserable without our other halves that the other gods took pity on us. Apollo decided we should have one way, just one, to find each other again. Make a mark on one half of a soul, it appears on the other. And thus, the modern soulmate myth was born."

He shouldn’t have come. It’s a huge risk. Flynn’s eyes flick around, half-expecting a phalanx of jackbooted thugs - Rittenhouse, FBI, it barely matters at this point - to stream through the doors any second.

He had to come, though. Despite the journal in his pocket, it’s still not entirely certain in his mind that she was real. So, when he read that Lucy Preston was giving a lecture on how soulmates influenced American history, it seemed like fate.

“Now, of course, nobody knows how it really happened, but that isn't the right question. The question we should be asking is what is a soulmate, really? And that depends on who you ask. Some say it’s your great love, but others will describe it as more of a spiritual guide. They could answer some great question in your life - or ask it. Some think it’s romantic; others platonic. People fought wars and founded countries based on how they interpreted their marks. It’s not just about love. But that’s part of it too.”

He chose a seat right in the back, so she wouldn’t see him and recognise him when the time comes. The Mothership won’t be complete for over a year, it should be fine. She caught his eyes once and paused for a second, and he felt that flare of recognition again, but then she kept moving.

“Dr Preston? I was wondering - you said there are a lot of different interpretations on what soulmates mean to each other. Which one do you think is right?” It’s someone else asking, not him, but he has an intense need to hear her answer.

Lucy smiles. “Well, I’m by no means an expert on that part,” she says. “But in all my reading, there's often this sense that your soulmate is the person you need most, right when you need them. I've come around to that as an explanation.”

* * *

Lucy is getting along fine, and then one day Mason Industries calls, and the entire world flips on its axis. Before she even knows how to process what’s happening, it’s 1937.

Later, she’ll think she should have realised that day. But the scar on the side of her neck doesn’t arrive until later, and she doesn’t really notice it for a day or two. That’s enough for the link between the cause and its effect to break. She's never been entirely sure how long it takes for the scars to arrive - with her parents, it was almost instantaneous, the wound still healing on one when the scar appeared on the other, but that doesn't mean it's the same here.

Instead, when this one arrives, she runs her thumb over it and smiles ruefully. Wonders where he might be, what he did this time. At least one thing is still the same, she thinks.

* * *

Wyatt Logan believes in fate. It’s hard not to, with everyone running around with someone else’s marks on them and an almost supernatural need to find the person they belong to. So yeah, it’s real. It’s also an asshole. How else do you explain it?

And so he knows, from very early on, that Lucy is not his soulmate. They meet in a way that makes him wonder, for those first few hours - brought together like this, under the most unlikely of circumstances. It must mean something, surely?

He’s... well, he’s not sure how to describe it. His marks matched Jessica’s almost (almost) perfectly, but when she died, they didn’t fade. When the police came to tell him they’d found a body, he didn’t believe them. He sobbed and showed them the scar on his arm and yelled at them to _F_ _ind my wife, goddammit, she’s still out there._

Nobody could tell him why other than the obvious: that almost perfect and perfect aren’t the same thing. One doctor he saw suggested he was one of the lucky few who had more than one soulmate, and that was why. It might complicate things enough to cause it. Might.

(When Jessica came back, they were still an almost perfect match. But it was a different almost than he remembered - she had the scars she'd been missing before and was missing some she used to have.)

So for a minute or two, he wonders if that’s what Lucy is. His complication.

But he has a scar on his back that’s impossible to miss, and when Lucy turns away from him in a cell in 1937, she doesn’t. She has plenty of scars twined around her torso, so many, too many - but they don’t match his.

Lucy catches him looking, and she shrugs. “He’s a soldier,” she says, in a matter-of-fact way, as she turns and buttons her blouse back up.

“You’ve met him?”

She pauses. “No. Not yet.”

(He falls in love with her anyway, and it's bad as you’d expect. Years later, his enduring memory is the flash of disappointment in her eyes in 1941, when he pulled his shirt off and it just confirmed what they both already knew: they didn’t match after all.)

* * *

Robert Lincoln flirts with her, and so does Ian Fleming. So do a few people, come to that. Somewhere in the middle of one night, her mind is still racing, and the thought occurs to her: what if her soulmate comes from a different time?

It shouldn’t be possible, but then neither should time travel, so who’s saying what is and isn’t possible anymore? Perhaps one day they’ll end up at the front lines of some war or other, buried deep in history, and there he’ll be. It would be just exactly the bullshit luck she’s had all her life.

(She’s not entirely wrong.)

* * *

Bonnie and Clyde is the first time they've met a pair of soulmates on a trip, really seen them up close, and it only makes it more awkward as she and Wyatt sit with them and try to pretend like they're something they aren't.

They could be, one day. That's how this story is supposed to go, right? Boy and girl save the world and fall in love along the way. That's every movie romance ever. Half the reason she’s trying so hard to fall in love with him is that it seems like she’s supposed to.

Wyatt tells the story of his own proposal and Lucy's heart breaks for him; he can barely hold her gaze when he finishes talking, after he kisses her, even though they're supposed to be selling it as the happiest moment of both of their lives.

Bonnie, who as they're learning loves the idea of romance almost as much as actually being in love, turns to her and says, "What about you, huh? How?”

If Wyatt can use his own history, so can she. It's just for the cover.

“My first scar was right here,” she says, smiling and pointing, as Wyatt gives her the same pitying look she was giving him a few moments before. “And then the second came, and the third, and then a few more. I never thought he was going to live long enough for us to find each other. My mom and dad were soulmates, and when I was little I remember she used to come into the kitchen sometimes when she got a new scar. _'Henry Wallace, what have you done now?'_ She was always so worried. And I guess I thought it would be like that too. I'd just meet him one day, and that would be it. But all that happened was I just kept getting more scars. I actually used to get annoyed sometimes. Did he know I was out there waiting for him? Couldn't he try and be more careful with himself? But the years kept going, and I guess I gave up on ever finding him.”

She pauses just long enough to see the frown begin to form on Bonnie’s face before she remembers that can’t be the end of the story today.

“And then I met Wyatt, of course.”

“Lemme guess,” Clyde says, gesturing between the two of them. “Love at first sight? Just like me and Bonnie here.”

Lucy laughs. “Oh no. I hated his guts. Least to begin with. He wouldn’t stop calling me _ma’am_. But I came around. And Wyatt already told you the rest."

She forces herself to smile as wide as she can, and Clyde grins back and tells her they have a hell of a story. Almost as good as his. Thankfully, that's the end of that conversation.

She knows Wyatt isn't the one. She's seen him half-dressed in the Mason Industries wardrobe room enough times to know that. Even if she didn't before, that night cements it, as they make up stories to try and force their edges together.

"So what, you believe in fate and destiny except when it comes to love?" Wyatt says when they talk.

She says, "I don't know," when what she means is _I'm tired of waiting_.

* * *

It’s fair to say Lucy isn’t entirely oblivious to the idea of Flynn. She has her suspicions, and as time passes and things take more and more of the shape he said they would, they grow stronger.

Being honest, it first occurred to her by the side of a river on the road to David Rittenhouse’s mansion. All he had wanted was for someone, anyone, to look at him and see the man he had once been rather than the one he was now. And she did - for a moment, at least. He’s never been purely one thing. Not to her.

After that, Chicago is very much not how she imagines being kidnapped usually goes. Half of that is the strange connection they’ve always had, but that isn’t everything. She realised, as he was pulling her towards the Mothership, that he has a pair of scars on his palm. Just like she does.

("You used to be good," she tells him at the Fair, and that same hint of hope flickers in his eyes for half a second before he blinks it away.)

* * *

He thinks of telling her a few times. It would surely be easier that way, rather than this song-and-dance through time until she figures out she’s been playing for the wrong team. But there are consequences to that, doors he isn’t looking to open. Rittenhouse gone and his family alive. That’s the goal. Anything else is secondary.

So he doesn’t, though he gets close. Once in 1927, when Karl leads her down the stairs and he can see the scars he got one particularly bad night in Chechnya curved around her arm. Then again in 1954, when she asks _What if he led you to me?_ and he wants to tell her he thinks it’s true.

(He tells her in 1927, “You needed to realise it for yourself,” and he’s not just talking about her father.)

* * *

Noah doesn’t understand what went wrong, not until she shows him.

“I’ll wait,” he says, the night she ends things for good. “Whatever you need. We’re soulmates, Lucy, it can’t end like this.”

Honestly, she hadn’t even considered it. She just assumed. She knows nothing at all about who she was in this timeline, without Amy or her father, but she didn’t think it could have been that different. Not everyone finds their soulmate - hell, not everyone wants to. It’s not that common, but it’s not uncommon, either. She figured she and Noah were one of those couples.

Apparently, she was wrong.

So she lifts the hem of her blouse high enough to show him a little of her collection and watches his heart split in half.

“I didn’t know they could change,” he says, quiet and devastated.

“They didn’t,” she replies. He won’t understand and she can’t make him, but it’s the closest to the truth she can get. “I did.”

* * *

After that, when the end is finally in sight, he thinks he really will tell her. She’s promised him the names of the men who killed his family; a half-formed thought says he should ask her to come with him. To thank her for it all. She still doesn’t understand how she saved him, and she should. He owes her at least that.

He starts to, fumbling over the words, not able to get to the core of the matter. There’s confusion in her eyes as he hands her back the journal and braces himself to say out loud what he’s known all along...

And then they’re surrounded by enough men in tactical gear to take down a small army, and it all goes to hell again.

“I _trusted_ you,” he remembers snarling - afterwards, in a cell by himself when all he has to do is replay it in his mind. He thinks, though, that he wasn’t talking to the Lucy standing there. When he pictures her face, all he can bring to mind is the woman from the bar in Sao Paulo.

That’s how he knows this is not the end of the story.

* * *

As so often happens, the pieces all fall into place together. They’re nowhere near in the order Lucy expected, but she’s used to that by now. It’s just more proof that the more she travels in this world, the less she knows.

“Thanks, Doc. I’ll try to get stabbed more often,” Flynn says, as sardonic as ever despite the hole in his side.

Later, when Wyatt kisses her, it’s... fine. Enjoyable rather than earth-shattering. With their clothes shed, it only makes the differences between them starker, but he is something to hold on to, and that’s what she needs.

And then they go home, and one by one the pieces of what she’s been building collapse and burn away. Flynn is there, and then Wyatt _isn’t,_ and it all hurts. So, she steps into the shower to wash this day down the drain, and there’s the scar - nestled between two ribs, a perfect twin for Flynn’s.

It takes a second. Her fingers trace its edges - ragged and unplanned as usual - as she tries to remember why it’s so familiar. The realisation barrels towards her like an out-of-control train.

(Not, in fact, unlike the man himself.)

And she knows.

* * *

Salem is... strange. Lucy is still reeling from the sheer weight of all the recent revelations, but there’s no time to sit and give each the attention they deserve, so she focuses on the one in front of her. Flynn’s stolen clothes cover him from chin to toe, so visual confirmation is out - it’s like he knows, somehow. Five minutes in, he calls her his wife, and she has to hide her shock as exasperation. Although to be fair, that isn’t that difficult.

The thing is, she knows now - that Flynn is her soulmate. She’s even said it out loud to herself, and it still sounds as strange and inevitable as ever. She’s not, however, planning on doing anything about it. As her visits to him in prison made clear, Flynn hates her. She’s not even sure she blames him when if she’d been an ounce more careful he’d have his family back right now. And even if that wasn’t the case, she has sworn off complicated entanglements with men who have dead wives. There are enough bruises on her heart without more of that, thank you very much.

(As it turns out, people who aren't your soulmate can still leave their marks on you.)

Still, there is that moment in the house where they speak without words. It’s unexpected, and, the swoop in her stomach makes her feel like she’s standing on the thin edge of a cliff and contemplating jumping. And then after, on the way home, he buckles her into her seat and comforts her and all his edges are softer, somehow. And Lucy wonders.

If nothing else, he’ll know soon. Her arm needs stitches for sure - an actual battle scar to match all of his for once. That is startling, because she’s not used to thinking about Flynn in the affectionate and exasperated way she always thinks of _him_. Only now, the two are one.

She pushes that thought down, along with all the other blanks her mind has filled in of its own volition. Best not to think about that.

* * *

Flynn needs no further proof, but the knife wound on his arm that shows up not a day after Salem removes any lingering doubts.

There was a moment he could have told her. Before they left, when she asked if she could trust him, he could feel his skin vibrating under her gaze yet again. All he could do was nod his head, though, because she doesn’t want to hear that he’s been hers far longer than he ever knew it.

And he still couldn’t protect her. He still failed her, like he’s failed everyone else he’s ever loved. She is a part of him, always, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t deserve far more, far better, than whatever meagre offerings he has to give.

So he puts on sleeves long enough to cover it and holds her hand as the fever burns through her. She barely remembers her own name, but somehow she still knows his. He says nothing.

* * *

Things are different after that. It becomes plain that despite his performances in prison, Flynn does not, in fact, despise her. The way he gravitates towards her, not to mention the way he looks at her, suggests just the opposite. He never imposes himself, but he’s never far - she gets the distinct impression that one sharp word from her and he’d disappear, never to return. It’s only somewhat surprising to find that isn’t something she wants. Thinking back, in Salem all it took for him to unleash himself was a tilt of her shoulders. It makes her wonder what else he’d do if she only asked.

Again. Dangerous territory.

Nobody understands why she’s so insistent that they pick up Flynn when they deposit JFK back where he belongs. Everyone else in the bunker assumes that she’s heartbroken over Wyatt, - hell, Flynn probably does too. She’s not _not_ , but he is only one part of the broken mess in her chest. Rittenhouse, her mother, her sister, Stanford, Wyatt, even Noah - it feels like someone threw everything she was in a blender and poured out an entirely new Lucy Preston. And somehow the only constant in all of it is Flynn and the scars they share.

Of course, it's not like she can tell any of them that.

Later, Flynn sits with her - he gets more beer when they finish the first, and she leans her head on his shoulder when he sits back down.

“Thank you,” Flynn says in a low voice as the credits roll, and that’s all. Neither of them moves, and they watch the next movie in silence, too. Flynn fits on the tiny couch about as well as he fits anywhere else - just barely, a little awkwardly, and determined to ignore both of those things - but sitting there with him, it’s like jigsaw pieces locking into place. Like for the first time, Lucy understands what it might be to have another person be a part of her. It’s not something missing, but something added on top, something greater than the sum of itself.

That’s the first time it seems real.

* * *

There’s still a voice in his head whispering he should tell her. He still ignores it. He is long used to ignoring his own wants at this point; this is no different.

The same thing happens in 1936 - he could swear she watches him as he fastens his cufflinks, but it all goes downhill from there.

“You don’t know me,” she snaps at him when he tries to press further than he should. That just cements it - he won’t tell her, definitely not yet. Because the thing is, she's right. He’s not someone she wants or needs in her life – he’s a mess, a broken shell of a thing, how could he be any good to anyone? He used to be, once, but that time has passed, and now he’s only good for fighting, that’s all she needs him for. Hell, the bottle is information she gave him - sort of - presumably so he would do something with it, and even then he manages to poke at wounds he didn't mean to. It's just been so long, and this part of him so rarely used.

In the car, he hums along to the radio and it makes things simpler, somehow.

“You knew from my journal that my mother sang that song, didn’t you?” she asks, and he nods, caught, but this time she doesn't seem to mind.

He doesn’t tell her the lines from the journal, but he remembers them like he remembers them all.

_You have a scar that stretches all the way down your back, so I do, too. When we were little, my mom used to sing us to sleep, and for every scar we got, she’d learn a new song. New stories, she said, so we could imagine where you were and how you got it. That one, she learned ‘I Wished on the Moon’ and we walked around the house singing it for weeks._

_You didn’t like to talk about that one, but you used to like to touch mine. I think you preferred the happier story._

* * *

The thing is, it’s been weeks since the couch, she’s known even longer than that - and Flynn still hasn’t said a word. He has also never met a long sleeve he didn’t like, which is indescribably frustrating. She’s spent a lifetime wondering what his body might look like, and now he’s right there in front of her and she still doesn’t know. And god, she wants to.

She’s stopped bothering trying to pull herself back from those kinds of thoughts.

Lucy knows she isn’t wrong - she can sense it, with a certainty she wasn’t aware she possessed. It’s like gravity, or two plus two, or her own name. Flynn is her soulmate. That much is just true.

He must have it figured out by now. He stayed while her arm was being stitched after Salem, so the second her scar appeared on his arm, that would be it. If he didn’t already realise – and wouldn’t that make sense? So, logically, if he hasn’t said anything, it’s because he doesn’t want to. He had a wife, after all, and he stole a time machine for her. There aren’t many declarations of love stronger than that.

And so she says nothing too. She’s not exactly eager for her soulmate to reject her, anyway. And of course that’s how this goes, of course she gets a soulmate who doesn’t want her. Just add that to the pile.

There are another few moments like Salem - the car, and again at the juke joint. Their knees brush under the table and she thinks she’s never seen him smile so much in all the time she’s known him.

For most of the way home, she convinces herself that’s enough. Calling Flynn her friend doesn’t sound right, it doesn’t cover enough of what they are to each other - but it’s at least true. and he’s more-or-less the only person she knows who wants nothing from her. Anyway, she’s a grown woman, and her world is so much more than this one thing. That won’t stop being true.

That doesn’t stop her from wishing he wanted something from her, though. Because she wants him. She may still be heartbroken over a few dozen other things, but she’s been looking for him for most of her life. She’s watched his story being written on her skin without ever knowing who he was all these years. Now she does, and she couldn’t stop wanting him if she tried. More than that, though - she's been drowning for so long now she's almost forgotten what it feels like not to. And of all of them, he's the only one who's noticed.

So she shows up at his door with the bottle of vodka - and it’s worth it just for his smile as he lets her in.

He sits next to her on the bed as they pass the bottle back and forth, talking about everything and nothing. The hours blur together, and she couldn’t say for certain how long they’ve been there, only that she has no plans to leave. After Rittenhouse, she pulled away - from Wyatt and Rufus and anyone who thought she could be the person she was before. She’d forgotten how good it could feel to just have someone to talk to.

She laughs at something he says, and it strikes her how close they are. If she wanted to, she could reach out and kiss him and barely move at all. His tongue darts out between his lips as they watch each other, and then... he stands up, abruptly, and like so many others, the moment passes.

In the morning - she doesn’t remember falling asleep in his bed, but it happened - he passes her coffee and for once he’s wearing a t-shirt. Finally, she can start to map him out. His arms - theirs, she supposes - are nowhere near as scarred as the rest of his body, but there are a few landmarks she knows. She should have recognised them back the prison, she thinks, but she wasn't looking for them then, and at the time, never imagined that she should have been. Most of these are fainter anyway, smaller, only completely visible up close.

There's the set she got in tenth grade - four of them, just peeking out from under the t-shirt hem; a long thin line on his other forearm - her sophomore year in college, as she remembers, another good luck charm. The curved line under his thumb is hers, a mistake with a kitchen knife forever ago, and she shivers and covers it by gripping the mug tighter.

“Any time,” he says as she leaves, and she shuts the door and thinks she may just take him up on that.

* * *

He finds himself up late one night, sitting around the kitchen table talking with Lucy, Rufus, and Jiya. None of them sleeps well any more. Either they’re too tired to be as wary of him as they usually are, or they’re taking Lucy’s lead, but it’s nice. It’s about as relaxed as he’s been in three years. Mostly the others talk and he listens, but still. The conversation turns to soulmates, as it so often does, and Rufus and Jiya recount the tales of how they each figured out it was the other.

“I’m pretty sure I knew long before he did,” Jiya says, and Rufus nods.

“I couldn’t believe the universe would be so cruel as to make my soulmate a _Trekkie_ ,” Rufus replies, and they all laugh.

“How about you, Flynn?” Jiya asks, clearly not sure how he’ll respond. “How did you find out?”

He looks up, a little startled, and Jiya quickly backpedals. “I mean, you don’t have to if you don’t want.”

“No, no, it’s fine,” he says, and risks a glance at Lucy. She’s just watching on, though, a slight smile on her face.

Jiya did not, technically, mention his wife, although the assumption was clear. He can work with that.

“Let me guess,” Rufus chimes in, and takes another swig of beer, “you were assassins assigned to kill each other, right? And then you realised you were soulmates and took down your evil organisation together?”

He laughs, which apparently surprises them more than anything else. “No, it wasn’t like that. We met at a bar, actually.

“I, uh... well, I wasn’t in a good way, and I thought the bottom of a few bottles was a good place to search for answers. Needless to say, there weren’t any. But - I think it was around one AM when she walked in, and I just... I could feel her. I have a lot of scars, and it was as if they were new again. Sometimes, after, I’d get the same feeling when she was near. And then she sat down next to me, she, uh... she took my hand, and I just knew. She saved my life that night. In more ways than one.”

He looks up again, having spent most of the time staring intently at the label on the bottle in his hand. Rufus and Jiya are both looking at him like they’ve never seen him before in their lives, but he barely notices them. It’s the first time he’s ever told the story like this, out loud. He can feel Lucy’s eyes on him and isn’t sure if he’s just imagining the weight of it.

He’s not. There have been a few more late-night conversations since their first, and at some point she always ends up looking at him the way she is right now. He holds her gaze for a few seconds before he looks away. He has to, or else do something stupid like confess everything. As promised, his scars prickle and burn under his shirt.

“That’s, um...” Jiya says, still a little lost for words. “I didn’t know.”

“How would you?” he says with a shrug, and sits back into his chair, slipping back into the usual unaffected mask they expect of him.

“So you could sense when she was nearby?” Rufus asks, and he nods. “Like a kind of... low-budget Harry Potter?”

That lightens the mood back up - Flynn laughs, and then the others do too, and a while later he claims to be tired and excuses himself. He doesn’t sleep.

* * *

The best time to take a shower in the bunker is around five AM. Everyone knows this, but Wyatt is the only one who's ever taken advantage.

(The pipes creak and groan all the time _anyway_ , he's not waking anyone up, and morning parade used to be at six, so it's really just keeping up with old habits.)

Or at least, he was, before Flynn got here. Other than a couple of incidents, they've done pretty well so far at avoiding each other, on a schedule neither of them have discussed but both are sticking to, but the chair system is inherently fallible and one day it does in fact fail.

Flynn is standing at the mirror, a towel (thank god for small mercies) slung around his hips, shaving in the mirror. He looks vulnerable like this, Wyatt thinks, which, for better or worse, is not a thought he expected to ever have about Flynn. He’s about to mutter a half-meant apology and reverse out the door when something - some twitch of the lights or movement of Flynn's reflection or _something_ , he'll never really know - catches his eye, and he looks at the lines that criss-cross the skin of Flynn's back and thinks, _I recognise these_.

His jaw might not actually hit the floor, but it must get close. _No._ No, no, no. This can’t be how this goes. Anyone else.

Seven fucking billion people on the planet, and it had to be him.

He stays rooted to the spot, because up is down and left is right and who knows what will happen if he takes a step. There’s no doubt in his mind - he'd touched those exact marks on Lucy before, he thought he'd get to again, he knows them - but fuck if he wouldn't give anything he owned to be wrong.

“It’s five dollars to keep staring, Logan." Flynn doesn't even turn around.

It still feels roughly as if Wyatt has been smacked in the face with a two-by-four, which is what he blames for blurting out, without any sort of tact or guile, "Does she know?"

Flynn's whole body tenses at the question. His eyes flick to meet Wyatt's in the mirror, wide like a deer caught in his headlights. For a few seconds, there is absolute silence, and then Wyatt watches as Flynn makes his choice.

"Does who know what?" he says, like the last few moments just didn't happen, and goes back to shaving. "I just need another five minutes."

Well, it's not like denial is uncommon around here.

"Yeah, okay, yeah," Wyatt says, and he's moving, although he doesn't remember telling his feet to do that. "I'll just... I'll come back when you're done."

* * *

For what is at least the third time, everything goes to hell.

“Why are you here?” Lucy asks him, in a dingy back room in Chinatown, and he freezes.

The timing could not be worse - her mother just died, for crying out loud - but he resolved a long time ago to tell her no more lies.

_Because I don’t know where else I would go without you_ is what he wants to say, but no words come when he opens his mouth.

He wonders if the fear is as plain on his face as it feels. Because he’ll tell her, and hear her rejection, and nothing will quite be the same again. The air in the room is somehow both unhelpfully thick and impossible to inhale, and he tugs at his collar but it doesn’t help. Lucy is waiting expectantly for an answer - and it takes him a moment to realise that’s what it is. Not confusion. Expectation.

She already knows.

She appears to be having more-or-less the same realisation at the same moment, because her eyes widen, and there it is. He knows. She knows. It’s still the farthest thing from simple.

The moment seems to last forever, everything still unspoken but, crucially, understood. For once in this whole sorry tale, they are on exactly the same page. His mouth starts to curve around the syllables of her name and finally, at what might be the second or the hundredth attempt, give voice to this feeling...

And then Wyatt flings open the door. Again, the moment disappears.

Lucy catches his eyes for a flash of a moment as she stands up, but he looks away.

His scars burn as he follows her outside.

* * *

Somehow, impossibly, things get worse.

Lucy is dimly aware of Flynn’s strangled voice calling for her from the alley, but everything is just pain and Emma and Rufus. Smart, funny Rufus, who she would never have made it this far without, who didn't deserve to die with that much fear in his eyes.

Every shot at Emma misses, and then Lucy collapses on the dirty floor like a puppet with the strings cut. She barely registers Flynn pulling his gun from her hand and into his arms.

Thankfully, he doesn’t try to make it better. He doesn’t shush or soothe her or lie that everything will be okay. He’s just there, like he always is, his body curved around her, shielding her as he lets her pour all of her pain and rage into him. The way he holds her, she can feel the scar on his palm against her skin - as always, the one single constant in the storm the rest of her life has become.

This... this is as low as it gets. It must be. All this death - that's the worst of it. She never thought she'd have to watch this many people die.

After a long while, when she thinks her legs might hold her again if she tries to stand, she shifts in his arms - and Flynn grunts in pain. Sure enough, when she releases her hand from where it's fisted in his jacket, it comes away red.

Lucy could swear her blood runs cold for just a moment - no, no, not him too, surely she's already lost enough today? Would the universe really be so cruel, so unfeeling, as to take her mother, her best friend, and her soulmate all in one day?

"I'm fine, it's okay, it's not that bad," he murmurs, though his face is set in a grimace.

She decides to believe him, though, because if the alternative is true she's never going to be able to leave this floor.

"I want to go home," Lucy says, though it's been a long time since she's known where that is.

* * *

The bunker feels empty. And quiet, too quiet, without Rufus to come around a corner and crack a joke and keep up their spirits. All there is now is the sound of the fans to distract them from their grief and pain. Lucy sits next to them, trying to let the white noise distract her, and it doesn't work. This day feels like the longest of her life, including the weeks with Rittenhouse, and it isn’t over yet.

Wyatt tells her he loves her, which is something she is absolutely unable to deal with on at least four different levels, and then as if things weren't confusing enough, there is another version of herself, who shows up and departs just as quickly. They need Rufus to win, the future pair tell them, as if they didn't know that already.

When the dust settles, everyone scatters. Except Lucy, who has nowhere to go. She wants to give Jiya space, let her have her grief in private - but the couch feels too exposed, every raw nerve in the open air. It only takes five minutes of fidgeting under the too-thin blanket to realise there’s no chance she can sleep there.

She knows where to find him. In this much, Flynn is blessedly predictable. Her hand shakes as she knocks on his door - exhaustion, fear, shock, take your pick - but she never doubts that he'll answer.

He does seem surprised to see her, but he steps aside so she can enter and pulls the door closed behind her. The second it shuts, she finally feels like she can exhale. His room is a cocoon, isolated and safe, somewhere no-one would dare to search for her. Somehow, without her realising, this room has become her refuge, and its inhabitant the only person she can stand to be around right now, who won’t look at her like she’s supposed to know what to do next.

Flynn speaks first.

"How are you feeling?"

"I..." Lucy starts, ready to tell him she's fine, she's always fine, but stops. "I honestly don't know."

"Do you want to... talk?"

"Not tonight.” Lucy sighs, the sound coming from deep inside her. “There's too much. But I just... I didn't want to be alone."

If she asked, she's sure he would sit here all night and tell her that they'll get Rufus back, that the future her other came from won't happen, and other various pleasant sounding things that may or may not be true. It still wouldn't help. Right now she just needs it to hurt.

Flynn smiles wanly, his face still paler and tighter than she’d like. One arm is tucked close to him in its sling, but he gestures at the bed with the other. “By all means.”

"You're _hurt_ , Flynn. I'm not going to take your bed."

"Well, I can't recommend the chair. It's worse than the couch."

"But it's alright if you sleep there?"

Flynn shrugs with his uninjured shoulder, which only makes the situation seem even more ridiculous. Lucy looks from him to the bed and back again, and thinks of earlier - how safe it felt when he held her. She might not be ready to dive into the rest of it yet, but that part, she suspects, will always be true. "I think we'd both fit," she says, hoping he'll understand.

For one long second, everything freezes. Not a single molecule moves. She wonders if this is it, the invisible line he's decided he won't cross even for her.

Then, just as quickly, everything relaxes, and he says "I'd like that," as if it was more than he ever dared hope for.

Almost without words, they arrange themselves on the bed like they've been doing it for years. He lies down; she tucks herself around him, careful to avoid anything that hurts, and then tugs the blanket over both of them. Simple. One day, maybe it won't be surprising to find that he fits neatly underneath her - it really is a very small bed - and the warmth of his arm around her back will be as familiar as breathing. For now, it is so all beautifully new and calm and safe that she finds herself blinking back tears.

She falls asleep with a murmured _thank you_ and the steady rhythm of his heartbeat under her fingertips.

* * *

Lucy sleeps. Flynn doesn’t. Knowing their luck, this day could still hide a final sting in its tail, and he’s more than content to lie with her warm weight on his chest and make sure that isn’t the case. Anyway, that struck-by-lightning feeling is dancing over his skin at every place they’re touching, which is everywhere, and that’s doing an excellent job of keeping him awake.

(He wonders if it’ll ever go away, then decides he doesn’t want that.)

The light changes, dim grey bleeding into the room, so if nothing else, at least yesterday is only a memory now. Today might not be better, but it couldn’t be worse. And it’s so quiet in here, almost peaceful, with only the hum of the fans in the background and Lucy’s gentle breathing. They might as well be the only people in the world, and if they’re lucky they can keep it that way for a little longer before reality rushes back in.

At some point, Lucy wakes up, though he doesn’t realise until her thumb is running over his knuckles. She’s just exploring, moving with no direction in mind - the pad of her thumb traces the length of his fingers, the back of his hand, and comes to rest on the faded silver slash between his thumb and wrist.

(It’s the same one she noticed when he handed her coffee the other time she fell asleep in his bed, though he doesn’t realise that.)

“I’m trying to remember what I was even making,” she says, barely above a whisper, “but I can’t. I remember the knife though, and it was Amy’s birthday, I know that. Fourteen. After I bled all over dinner, we ordered takeout. She used to say it was her favourite birthday.”

It was a long time ago now that Flynn gave up any hope of ever learning any of these stories, and hearing this one, simple as it is, has a lump forming in his throat. He raises his thumb, so it brushes along hers - and that’s enough. Lucy gives a content little hum, and then she’s back to exploring. Very gently, she touches his shoulder, just the tips of her fingers ghosting over the bandages through his sweater.

“How bad is it?”

God, it’s been so long since he had anything like this. Since anyone was careful with him. “It’s not too bad,” he says, when he remembers how to speak. “I don’t think it’ll be too big.”

There’s a hint of apology in his tone, enough for Lucy to twist so she can look at him.

“That’s not what I’m worried about,” she says, somewhere between fond and exasperated, and holds his gaze until he believes her.

“Oh.” _Oh._ “It’s not ideal. But I’ve survived worse.”

“I know.” Her fingers trace over his shoulder a little longer, but eventually Lucy settles back onto his chest and brings her hand back to cover his. Within a few minutes, her breathing evens back out, and this time, Flynn lets himself sleep.

* * *

They still don’t talk about it. They should, they absolutely should, but there really isn’t time. That’s Lucy’s excuse, anyway. There is so much else happening, and at the very least they understand who they are to each other now. God, what she wouldn’t give to have one simple thing in her life. One thing that won’t turn to ash in her hands. One person she gets to keep.

And there is so much to like about the way things are now. It’s been a while since someone was genuinely pleased to see her, but he is every time. The way his face changes and softens when she says his name might just be her favourite thing about him. Every night, at some point he’ll tilt his head at her in quiet question and if she nods, no matter how late it is, he’ll still be awake when she gets to his room and climbs into the bed beside him. She’s still not sure if the question is _Do you need me_ or _Would you please_ , but the answer to both is still yes. She can whisper her secrets to him in the darkness and know he will keep them.

(He doesn’t leave. Every morning, she is the one who gets out of bed first, even though she knows he wakes up long before her. _He doesn’t leave._ )

“So, you and Flynn, huh?” Jiya asks one night when it’s only the two of them still downstairs.

Lucy would rather not talk about it, but since Jiya so rarely talks to them at all these days, she sighs and tells her, “It isn’t like that.”

“Hey, no judgement here. You’re both adults. You get to make whatever choice you want.”

“I know. It just... it really isn’t like that.” Lucy shrugs. “He’s... We're..." She trails off, and Jiya tilts her head to the side, as if to say yes, thank you, she's already figured that much out for herself. "But he’s married. And I don’t exactly have the best track record with that.”

It isn’t always romantic, she keeps reminding herself. God knows she’s written it in enough papers. Feeling like this, the disappointment - it’s just thirty years of social conditioning she can’t shake yet. Does she even love him? On that much, she isn't sure, partly because she isn't sure if that's a word she'll be comfortable using again any time in this, or any, century.

(There is a certain level of denial involved in admitting that someone is an irreplaceable part of who you are, but not being able to say you love them. As has been established, though, denial is what keeps most of this team on their feet most days, so Lucy allows it.)

In any case, they’ve found each other, which is a lot more than she ever expected. Flynn just isn’t interested in her that way, though she thought once he might have been. Hell, if she hadn’t figured it out for herself, he probably still wouldn’t have told her, and if that isn’t proof then what is?

She misses most of what Jiya says, but it ends, “and you must have seen the way he looks at you,” and Lucy can’t stop her eyebrows lifting.

“How’s that?”

“He looks at you,” Jiya says, and pauses while she searches for the right phrase, “the way most people look at stars.”

“Small and pale?” She gives a little _hmm_ of a laugh. “Not sure that’s much of a compliment.”

“No.” Jiya shakes her head, bemused. “Beautiful, and completely out of his reach.”

* * *

"This is my husband, Garcia," Lucy tells F. Scott Fitzgerald, only because Wyatt is stepping forward to make the claim for himself and she _can't_.

(There's a kind of horrible irony to the idea that now Wyatt wants her to choose him, when he never did the same for her.)

Flynn, to his credit, only looks bewildered for a fraction of a second - worth it, for all the times he's done it to her - before he steps forward and effortlessly into the role.

"We're thinking of buying just down the coast from here," he says, his arm curling around her waist in a way that absolutely should not make her feel as warm as it does, "and we’re trying to get a feel for the place."

1922\. Rittenhouse wants to make sure he never finishes _Gatsby_ , for reasons that are probably something to do with it being a vicious indictment of their entire social class. It seems straightforward enough. He hasn't even started it yet, as Lucy told them on the way here, but that appears to be the point.

Thus, they spend an afternoon pretending to be married in front of one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, which really shouldn't sound as normal as these things do to Lucy now. But it’s actually surprisingly fun. They touch more than is strictly necessary to maintain the cover, while Lucy asks seemingly innocent questions. Flynn grins at her over a game of croquet when they narrow down the sleeper to one of two recent arrivals. They even get an update of sorts on their old friend Ernest Hemingway, though technically they won't meet him for another five years.

Later, they are shown to a spare bedroom together, which is yet another thing that would have once seemed alien and now seems as natural as breathing. Somebody has procured a dinner suit that will more-or-less fit Flynn, though he keeps muttering under his breath that the sleeves are _too damn short, you’d think nobody had ever grown above six foot before_ as he dresses, and Lucy has to stifle her giggles.

"Something funny?" Lucy can hear the amusement in his voice, warm and soft, and turns to smile back at him.

"Oh no, of course not," she jokes back. This is just so _comfortable_ , she thinks, and so very nearly perfect. "Just, if you'd told me a year ago I'd be listening to you complain about your shirtsleeves, I don't think I'd have believed you."

A look passes over Flynn’s face that’s part warm and part wistful, just a tiny hint of a frown.

Zelda Fitzgerald has loaned her a necklace for the evening, which is definitely going in the book she's never going to be allowed to write one day, about all of this. It's a beautiful thing, delicate loops of gold and gemstones, and she hasn't a hope of getting it fastened herself.

"Would you help me with this?" she asks, gesturing. Flynn nods at her in the mirror and quietly crosses the room until she feels his presence at her back, warm and solid and far more familiar than she ever thought he would be. He takes the necklace from her with a soft hum; his hand comes up to brush her hair out of the way, fingers brushing over her skin as he fiddles with the clasp.

There’s something, a warm feeling in her stomach she can’t quite put a name to, about knowing the strength that lies behind those hands, all the ways he knows how to use it, and seeing him choose to be gentle anyway. He can be a dangerous man - but not to her. Never to her.  
  
"There," he says in a low murmur she can feel, and doesn’t move away. His fingertips move just the smallest distance, to trace over the scar on the side of her neck, and her breath catches at his touch.

"We’ve come a long way since this, _hmm_?"

"We have," Lucy agrees. Those are about the only words she can manage, since all of a sudden it feels like all of the air has left the room. What was it he said, all that time ago? Quite the team?

She watches Flynn in the mirror; he doesn’t look up, watching his own fingers trace little circles on her skin. It doesn’t feel like an exaggeration to say the entire world narrows to the single point of contact between them. It wouldn't take much - a tiny movement to lean back against him, open herself up, let him in. Another to turn, pull him down by his bow tie, and finally kiss him.

The thing is - Flynn does not, as a general rule, touch her. He will, when called upon - like earlier today - but it's not something he initiates. The bed they've been sharing in the safe house - his? theirs, since she's never slept anywhere else? - is exactly large enough so they don't touch unless one of them reaches out, and so far he hasn't unless explicitly invited.

(She has her bad nights like everyone else, and drawing constellation lines between the edges of the scars on his arms with her fingertips, reminding herself that there is at least one thing in the world that is undeniably hers, is about the only thing that calms the roaring in her mind.)

Flynn’s head dips just slightly, as if he might actually be thinking of pressing his lips to the side of her neck, and a hot curl of want surges through her. _Yes_ , she thinks, in case he can somehow sense it, _please_.

He can’t, though, and in fact the opposite happens. Flynn shakes his head a little, his hand drops away, and he takes a little step backwards.

"There," he repeats, and is she imagining things or does he sounds just the tiniest bit breathless? "You look beautiful."

He takes another step back, and yet again the moment passes.

* * *

There is a great irony in the fact that they are actually very good at talking about most things. They are both prone to bouts of insomnia, and in the hours between dark and dawn, it often happens that words come easier than sleep. Sometimes it's Flynn, but mostly it's Lucy who says something first. She no longer wonders why it is he's so easy to talk to - it's self-explanatory. It's an innate trust, an understanding that no matter what it is, he wants to hear it. She knows it now because she feels the same - hoards the parts of him he shares like gold dust, pieces of him that are only for her.

There is one night - this is after 1922, and Lucy thinks they're closer than ever to stepping off the tightrope. The countdown to their inevitable collision can probably be measured by the ever-diminishing space between them. It's not a bad thing, she's decided, that nothing happened back there, back then - she'd been swept up in the romance enough in Hollywood, trying to let it cover up everything else that was wrong, and she won't do that again.

Tonight it's the living room couch - Flynn doesn't like to stay in one place when things are bad for him, as if he can lock his demons in one room and leave them behind. So they sit there, Lucy curled into his side, passing little snippets of conversation back and forth as Flynn tries to distract himself. He has a book in his hands, which is his usual method of distraction - only it's some genuinely terrible piece of drudge that's pretty much the only thing in the house he hasn't read already. Occasionally in the quieter moments, she'll read a page or two over his shoulder.

The main character's name is Amy.

He always looks abashed whenever Amy comes up. He's stopped apologising, and she has stopped telling him it wasn't something he could have foreseen, words that have been said so often before that they can be repeated with only a tilt of his head and a raise of her eyebrow.

"I wonder what happened to them sometimes," Lucy says to the floor at some point. "Amy’s soulmate. Do they think she died? Or do they have another now, and if they do, how can they really have been hers?"

She thinks back to Noah, what seems like a thousand lifetimes ago, and to this day can’t quite believe there’s any version of herself that would belong to anyone other than the man next of her. He says nothing, just watches her with that look of his, somehow still managing to look up at her from under his eyelashes despite the fact that they're sitting side by side.

(It seems Jiya might not have been entirely wrong, after all.)

"Am I a terrible person if I hope they didn’t get someone to replace her? That somebody out there misses her as much as I do?"

"You could never be terrible," he says, because sometimes he just says things like that with no regards for what it does to her insides. "Take it from a pro."

"You're better than you think." She reaches out, cups his cheek in her hand - she's learnt he likes the contact as much she does, he just won't ask for it, and oh, they're so close now, that space between them almost non-existent. "I promise."

"So are you." His lips quirk into a little smile, and after a second he covers her hand with his own. "They'll get her back one day. You both will."

————

They have another mission not long after that. This time, the sleeper is found and dealt with relatively quickly; good. Less good: Flynn's shoulder still hasn't fully healed, and he manages to re-open the wound in the process.

Of course, because he's who he is, he neglects to actually tell anyone this has happened. It's not that bad anyway - he barely noticed it until the Lifeboat touched down and the adrenaline started to fade. Still, it won't stitch itself up, so as the others fill Denise and Connor in on their exploits, Flynn slinks off to the bathroom with the suture kit.

He shrugs off the jacket and shirt - vintage 1930s, excellent condition other than the blood stains - and gets to work. The angle isn't ideal, and his left hand is far clumsier than his right, but it's still not the worst injury he's patched up himself. No, that honour belongs to the scar that traces the curve of his hip, which as he recalls was hastily stitched back together in the back of a moving truck.

Maybe he'll tell Lucy about that one, someday. If she asks. If she wants to know.

"Flynn?"

And there she is, as if his thoughts could summon her. Maybe that's why they so rarely need words.

(She tells him later she just had a feeling, because it had been weeks and she still didn't have a scar where she should.)

He's been trying so, so hard to just be there for her, to not be too much. Jesus, it's not her fault he's fallen in love with her twice now - once in that bar in Brazil, with the impossible vision who arrived out of the night and saved him right when he needed saving, and again with the messy, brave, beautiful woman in front of him now. His heart was dead and buried long ago, encased in concrete - and still he couldn't stop himself from loving her. He did try.

(He's not bold enough to lie and say he'd stop if he could, but for whoever ends up weighing his soul at the end of all this, he did try.)

Neither of those truths are something he has any plans to make her deal with, though. Surely that's a part of this whole soulmate business - not pushing too hard, not asking for things the other shouldn't have to give.

He forgot himself for a minute, in that room in the Fitzgeralds' house - something he's been thinking about more-or-less ever since. Won't happen again.

"It isn't locked," he calls back, and the door clicks open. Lucy already has a concerned look on her face before she's over the threshold, and her eyes widen as she takes in the scene in front of her. "It's not as bad as it looks," he adds, too late.

"You're _bleeding_." His assurance does very little to allay Lucy's fears, it seems, since she's over to where he is in two seconds, her hands hovering in the air between them. "What... when did this happen?"

"Just as we were leaving." He shifts his weight and grimaces, and okay, yes, he probably should have let Wyatt take down the sleeper, but he was closer and hindsight isn't helpful right now. "Honestly, _draga_ , it isn't that bad. I'm almost done."

The endearment slips out before he has a chance to stop it; luckily, Lucy doesn’t seem to notice it. She looks at him, in a combination of frustration and sadness, and then reaches past him to pick up the wet cloth on the sink and starts to clean the blood off his chest.

"You don't have..." Flynn sighs. "I know you don't like blood."

"I've had to get used to lots of things I don't like," she says, and it burns just as much as the wound on his shoulder.

There is a long silence, within which Flynn finishes the stitches and Lucy, despite her frown, gently wipes away the last of the blood.

"I wish you knew you didn't have to do this by yourself," she says - sighs, more like, and he winces again. "We're supposed to be... partners."

_Partners_. Of course. No more, no less. It's just been a long time since he's had one.

"I'm sorry."

Lucy seems marginally happier, and she nods with a sort of frustrated affection. Her eyes travel back down the length of his body - checking, he assumes, for any more damage he's neglected to mention. Except then she brushes over his side with her fingertips - not a single scar so much as a collection, and clearly old and healed - and he realises this must be the first time she's seen them on someone other than herself.

"I always wondered how you survived these." Her voice is quiet, almost reverent. "I woke up one morning and there were just so _many_. But they were still there, every time I checked."

"I didn't think I had," he says. "Survived. They told me when I woke up, I asked if it was Heaven or Hell. Evidently, I thought I had a 50/50 shot at either. I'm sorry I scared you."

Lucy shrugs. "It was fifteen years ago. More, even."

"Still."

They share a quiet look; Lucy swallows, clearing gearing herself up for something, and then asks,

"Why didn't you ever tell me?"

There it is. The conversation they've both been avoiding thus far. There's a pregnant pause, Lucy's hand still flat against his chest, and surely she must be able to feel the way his heart is hammering against his ribs. "At first, I told myself I didn't care." She winces slightly at that, though she tries to hide it, and he adds, "And then... I wanted you to believe me because you believed me, not because of _that_."

"Did it ever occur to you that maybe _that_ was exactly why I gave you the journal in the first place? So we could do it all together?"

"You think you would have believed me, if I'd told you at the beginning?"

It keeps happening, this - moments where it feels like all that exists are the two of them and the air between them, the words almost whispered into that space. Maybe she wouldn't mind if he kissed her. Just once. Just to see if she tastes like home, the way he imagines she would.

Lucy's hand moves to trace another scar, her eyes following, and she will have to stop soon because her touch is doing things to more parts of him than his heart. "I don't know. I might have. If you'd showed me."

"Maybe." He doesn’t sound convinced, he’s sure.

"You still could have done it after you got here."

So could she, he almost points out, but it's not quite the same.

"I wasn't sure you'd want to know," he says instead. "Not if it was me. Not after everything."

She steps back from him at that, her hand dropping back to her side, and he picks up the bloodied clothes and makes for the door. It must just be his imagination that hears her sigh, "I would have," under her breath as they leave.

* * *

"There's something I haven't told you."

It could be either of them saying it. God knows they both have enough things they're holding back.

(Occasionally things are bad enough that Lucy can hear her own pulse, and it sounds like _Rittenhouse_.)

This night, it's Flynn. He's been quiet for the past day or so, since their moment in the bathroom, and she's learning to read him well enough to know what that means. Like a tidal wave, he recedes before the impact comes. Most of the night to this point has been spent listening to the rain - an uncharacteristic late summer deluge - beat off the roof, pretending they don't both know the other is still awake.

She looks over and he's lying almost perfectly still, staring at the ceiling - and that's another of his tells. If he can't even look at her, it's bad.

"The night we met... the first night..." His throat bobs, working hard, but no more words come out. Then, Flynn does something entirely unexpected.

He reaches out for her. His fingers go to her wrist - no searching, no fumbling, just a careful brush over her skin. He knows exactly what he's looking for and he finds it without hesitation.

"This was my first, you know," he says, his head turning just enough to see the point of contact. "You can't have been more than five or six, I doubt you'd even remember what happened."

She doesn't, though at this moment she'd give anything to remember it. Firsts are special - they don't fade over time, which is how this otherwise unassuming little slash has lasted thirty years.

"Flynn," she whispers, and she's not sure he even hears her.

"You still had it that night," he continues, and then his hand moves and finds the palm of hers - two more scars, vertical lines down the middle. The same ones she felt once, the first time she started to wonder if their connection was more than met the eye. The tip of his finger strokes over them, in a gesture so fond, so unexpectedly intimate, that it makes her ache. "You had these too."

"Curling iron," she says, because at that moment it seems important to share. "I tried to catch it. Don't recommend it."

Flynn chuckles, just for a second, and sighs. He reaches out once more, across her body to the other side, and curls his hand around her arm. His palm lies flat against the scar this time, the one that runs down the centre of her forearm. Unlike the others, this is one of his.

"You didn't have this," he says, and Lucy would swear to god her blood actually runs cold. "Not any more."

" _No._ " It comes out strangled, more of a plea than anything else. She's only ever seen someone's marks disappear once - her mother's, after her father died, and she remembers how things were never the same after that.

Flynn finally looks at her, as uncertain and apologetic as she's ever seen him, and Lucy does the only thing she can think of when they've already wasted so much time. All of history at their feet, and there's still never enough of it.

She kisses him. She kisses him, and it feels like a river surging, a dam bursting, so hopelessly _right_ that she can't quite believe it hasn't happened before now. There's more desperation to it than she would have wanted, a sharper edge than she would have planned for the first time they did this, but Flynn opens his mouth against hers and tugs her closer, and all that matters is the taste of him on her tongue, the feel of his hand on her hip.

She would like to say she remembers every moment of that night in perfect detail; she doesn't. There are parts of it that are lost to the ages, that she will look back on years later and vainly try to recall. The exact shade of green in his eyes in the half-light, the colour of the bedspread, the many different ways he says her name.

Here is what she does remember: Flynn, chuckling against her as she tries to pull off his t-shirt whilst still kissing him, and how the little hum of frustration she gives makes him laugh harder until she presses herself against him. She doesn't remember crawling into his lap, or him sitting up, but she remembers kissing him until she is dizzy, until they are both breathless when it breaks.

His skin is bare in front of her, and oh, this, she knows. She traces every line, every slash and curve and jagged edge, with her fingers and lips and tongue, and then lets him do the same to her. He plants a line of feathery kisses down the valley between her breasts, follows it with his hands, down and down and _down_ , until he reaches his destination and everything goes white.

She pushes him onto his back again after that, and sucks a mark into the skin above his heart. Lucy looks down at it, traces over it with her fingers, and she likes it - something about marks, hers and his, and though it's only temporary, the one mark they don't share is one she gave him. This isn't exploration, no; this is following old, familiar roads and knowing they will lead you home.

He is not perfect. He is battered and flawed and he's been broken so many times in so many ways that they all blur together under her hands. And yet every piece of him she touches, she feels the same part of her lock into place.

He is not perfect. He is something better than that. He's hers.

"Lucy." It's not fair. She knew that, about the world, that it would take and take and take from her, but he was the one thing she wasn't supposed to have to lose. Not when he says her name like an _I love you_ and looks at her like she is the entire world.

He tilts his head silently, his breath still coming heavily. It's his way of asking if she is sure, and she seals her mouth over his once more and guides him inside her, she has never been more sure of anything.

There is an unavoidably frantic note to it all - the roll of Flynn's hips underneath her, their foreheads pressed together and fingers intertwined, passing moans back and forth between them. And that _is_ one thing she remembers: the sounds - pants, moans, whispers, whines, some from him and some from her, all of them mixed in with the sounds of the rain hammering above their heads. At some point, as his rhythm starts to stutter, she tastes salt, and she's not sure which of them it is. Could be both. He whispers her name again as he comes, mixed in with words in languages she doesn't speak and doesn't have to, to know what he means. Joined like this, touching almost everywhere they can, Lucy thinks back to those old stories - the gods striking the soulmates in two, worried of how powerful they could be with nothing separating them.

They were right to be afraid.

After, they lie pressed together, neither willing to move away from the other. Flynn's fingertips trace over her arm as she noses at the curve of his neck.

"We'll find a way," she says, and presses her lips to the scar on her neck, that's she's starting to think of as the one that started all this. "I don't know how. But you are not allowed to die. Okay?"

He presses his lips to the top of her head, says nothing, and that is the last thing she remembers before she falls asleep.

* * *

Two nights later, Flynn wakes just as the sun is starting to peek over the horizon - and Lucy isn't there. She isn't downstairs, either, and the panic starts to rise in his throat unbidden.

(Lucy is not Lorena, it isn't happening again, it _isn't_ , but the panic is still there.)

Eventually, he finds her - outside, in the barn, sitting on the steps across from the Lifeboat, just staring up at it.

You forget, sometimes, just how big the Lifeboat is. It fills three-quarters of the barn, this great hulking shadowy _thing_ that dominates just as much physical space as it does space in their heads, in their lives.

"What are you thinking about?" He lowers himself onto the step next to her.

"Rufus." Lucy sighs, still looking up at the machine as she shifts closer to him. "Amy. You."

"Lucy..." He fixes his gaze on her, not the Lifeboat, but she doesn't turn.

"I understand now," she continues, like she barely heard him. She might not have, honestly - he's seen her get lost in her own thoughts plenty of times, and it looks like this. "Why I must have done it. I mean, I assumed I chose you because of us, but I always wondered - why _then_ , exactly? But I know now. It was because you were gone. And I suppose I thought - or I'll _think_ \- it was my best chance to get you back."

It's not a point he can argue. This is something he's had a long time - years - to come to terms with, to understand that this is not a story he'll see the end of. It's barely something he worries about any more, since that would be the fastest way to lose his mind he can think of. It just... is. And if he gets to spend a few nights next to the woman he loves before it all happens, so much the better. It's more of a reward than he ever expected.

"Do you think it's always going to be like this?" Lucy asks, her mind obviously still whirring. "Just... constantly chasing after the things we've lost, hoping we get them back, waiting to see what's next? What's the point, if all we ever do is _lose_?"

There is so much on her shoulders - so many burdens she's been carrying - it's inevitable she'd want to put some of it down eventually. The least he can do is help carry a little of it. He reaches out and - in a gesture she'll recognise in a few years' time, if none of this goes their way - lays his hand on her knee, the pair of scars across the palm upturned and visible. _I'm yours_ , he says silently, the way she once did to him. _Always._

"We haven't lost," he says. "Not yet."

"Maybe not." Lucy sighs, and twines her fingers with his. "But even if we beat Rittenhouse... If you're not there, if none of you are, we don't _win_ , either."

"If my...If it's what it takes, Lucy... What's one person against all of history?"

" _Everything_." She finally looks at him then, and he realises it's not sadness creasing the lines of her face - it's anger. A sharper kind of grief, for all the things she's lost and is yet to. "That's why I came to find you. You can't tell me you wouldn't the same, you already did it once."

Again, not an arguable point, exactly.

"Lucy," he says, "for you, I'd steal as many time machines as it took. I'd have Connor build more. But I'm..."

"You're worth it. Don't you dare say you're not."

The thing is, he isn't. One more soldier lost to war; history is littered with those stories. He would be far from the first, or the last. But if she thinks he is? 

"Alright," he says, and brings her hand up with his to gently press his lips to it. "We'll try."

It isn't a happy ending, because it isn't an ending at all. There are battles to fight and wars to win and who knows what else along the way. Somewhere out there is the bullet, or the knife, or whatever else it is he’ll need to dodge to stay with her. But Lucy kisses him and tells him again that he is, under no circumstances, to die of anything other than old age, and for her, he promises. And maybe they'll be lucky. Maybe the plan has already worked. But whatever the future holds, they'll face it.

Together.


End file.
